Tag Archives: drawing

It may have taken me far longer than I want to admit, but I think I may have actually finished a drawing! I have a book full of half finished pieces that I have ideas about but never really get around to working on them so they end up just sitting, waiting for some inspiration. I decided to try and redraw something that I have already done as it will be easy but then somehow end up making a whole new piece based off of the original but tweaked somehow.

I still have plenty of ideas of little things that I want to try and I do have to admit that the starting idea of this drawing wasn’t mine at all. It was based off of an excellent YouTube tutorial I watched over a year ago on a channel called Peter Draws. Watching that showed me that I could pick up a pencil and try something new as he showed me how to build up the sections to create what eventually becomes a finished drawing. I am very grateful to that video channel for getting me to even try drawing.

As with all my drawings though, I went wrong along the way at some point but owned my errors and turned them into features rather than focusing on how it didn’t work out properly. The thing that I find most interesting about this process is that when I show people my drawings they often pick out some of my “mistakes” as their favourite features. These unintentional additions to the drawings seem to become focus points that achieve something I wasn’t even trying. Other times when I get stuck I end up just staring at the paper not knowing where to go. I cant see what the final goal should be and then end up not doing anything rather than making a wrong decision. At times like this I swap the pencil for the pen and stick in some permanent lines. These lines are things that I cant come back from and then force the rest of my decision making. Often these lines are just what I need to get a bit of a plan and move forwards as the limitation of my options actually helps me rather than hindering.

I don’t want to get too deep but sometimes I think this is kind of a metaphor for life. We all sometimes get stuck and don’t know where to turn or what to do. The number of options that we now have in life is staggering and we can often end up not making any decision rather than making one that is wrong. The harsh reality is that despite what we have been told my the media, we cant do everything in life. What we can do though is something.

Lots of people don’t do anything because of fear which is the same as me looking at my paper. Drawing in a line will exclude many of the things that I could do with that drawing and vastly limit its potential outcome but it has to be done. If I abstain from making a decision then I will just sit there looking and never doing until the day the ink dries in my pen and I sit back to look at the blank paper with dreams of what could have been.

My drawings are not perfect but they are the best I have and much better than they were before I ever picked up the pen and made something happen.

I guess what I am trying to say is for all you people out there on the fence is to go out and take a leap. It might be the right one, it might be the wrong one, but sitting there deciding isn’t going to help. I spent years not taking action because I wanted to wait for the perfect plan and the secret I eventually found was that there is no perfect plan at all. All the people I have met in my life who have done amazing things never had a perfect plan when they started, they just tried something and went from there. So get out there everyone and go do somethings.

I’ve been doing a lot more drawing since I have been in New Zealand and have really enjoyed the relaxing process of sitting down with a pen or pencil to just see what happens on the paper. I don’t know if I can really even call it drawing as I am more tracing lines made with a compass but I still enjoy it.

A lot of people have commented on all of it so I thought I would show a bit of a break down on the process so you can all see what is involved and how it all started progress and take shape.

Drawing the lines based on circles.

It all starts with a simple circle. The first circle in the centre is drawn and then another 8 circles are drawn off of that, all the same size. In this instance I decided to do on an bit of an over / under pattern on the lines to give it a bit more of a flow.

Deciding on line fitness

I decided that the line needed to be a bit thicker and made marks as to where my lines would stop and how wide they would be.

start thickening the linesFinished the thick lines

I thickened all the lines before getting ready to colour them in.

Filling inAll black and starting the finer details

After colouring in it was time to start adding on finer detail which i did in most parts to mimic the same contour lines of the original drawing.

Finished Drawing with fine details

I seemed to miss a few pics towards the end as I got tired and forgot but basically I started free-styling it and just deciding how to use up more of the space.

I think I am happy with the overall outcome of it so Just need to work on improving it next time. Maybe even do a much bigger drawing with this as the centre. As soon as I get settled I think I will get myself an A3 Notepad and try doing some bigger drawings. See how it all pans out 🙂